For reviewing the referenced commits of a story or task, you have to include the issue ID as a hashtag in the commit message, I needed a better overview than just a flat list of commits.

I want to group the commits by file. In case of Rails apps I also want to group files with commits by the following categories: library, model, controller, javascript, view, tests, configuration and misc.

Therefor I implemented the Ruby gem commit_filter for Rails apps which renders filter results e.g. about commits referencing issue #56 like this:

Each commit is linked to a blame page and you get code diffs in a modal.

Installation

As a standalone Application

git clone git@github.com:rails-info/rails_info_application.git
cd rails_info_application
bundle install

Start the Rails server and then you'll find the filter under this path: /rails/info/commit/filters/new

As a plugin

Add it to a development group in the Gemfile of your Rails 4 App:

group :development do
  gem 'commit_filter', '~> 0.1.1'
end

Mount it to your desired path or just root through the routes file:

mount CommitFilter::Engine => '/'

Have I mentioned that the Gem requires Twitter Bootstrap 3 ;-) But it's easy to write a new frontend framework adapter through inheritance.
So if your Gemfile does not include Twitter Bootstrap 3 then add it through the development group: gem 'bootstrap-sass', '~> 3.3.4.1' (How to setup CSS and JS manifest files can be found >> here <<)

If your application manifest files does not include Twitter Bootstrap 3 then you should point the gem to the CSS and JS manifest files which do through an initializer file:

CommitFilter.configure do |config|
  config.manifest_file = 'twitter_bootstrap'
end

Start the Rails server and then you'll find the filter under this path: /commit/filters/new

Configuration

If you like to set default values for the filter form then you can set them through an initializer file:

CommitFilter.configure do |config|
  config.attribute_name = 'value'
end

All available configuration options can be found >> here <<.

Remote Repositories

All repositories and branches have to be checked out locally before filtering. I would also like to access remote GitHub repositories without local checkout but GitHub has no API for commit search and paginating over commits like in local environment is too expensive - rate limit.

P.S.: I recommend to limit the result by a time span for faster queries.